Rainer Neuwirth

Natural Gas Processing - Nitrogen Removal from Natural Gas: Technical and Economical Evaluation of Processes for Nitrogen Removal Rainer Neuwirth

The growing demand on natural gas leads to the necessity to upgrade sub-quality gas. Thissub-quality gas partly contains high amounts of nitrogen and/or carbon dioxide, sometimeshelium is even a component of natural gas. To achieve pipeline and sales gas specification itis necessary to remove non desired components. Higher hydrocarbons such as ethane, propane, butane and pentane and helium can formvaluable by-products. It is economically feasible to recover helium, if the amount in naturalgas is higher than 0.1 mol%. Some of the recovery processes are well known from air separation:- Cryogenic single column.- Cryogenic double column.- Adsorption (Pressure Swing Adsorption, PSA). In the last decades three additional processes were introduced into gas processing industry:- Absorption (Mehra ProcessSM).- Adsorption (Molecular GateTM).- Membrane Separation. This book gives a short overview of above mentioned processes and compares the processes in technical and economical aspects.